Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 17:37:52 -0500 Reply-To: Maryland Birds & Birding Sender: Maryland Birds & Birding From: rick Subject: Finding Snowy Owls Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" You know how far behind I am when I'm just getting around to this post, but the winter is long and the Snowy Owl season is just begun. Marshall wrote: > >Snowy Owls have a knack for turning up in weird places though. Note that a >number of Snowy Owl records in MD have come from urban areas. The District of >Columbia has several records from The Mall, Haines Pt., and National Airport. >A number of other recent ones have shown up in downtown Baltimore (Ft. >McHenry), downtown Annapolis (Hillsmere), and along the Washington Beltway >and/or I-270. Watch those tall buildings on your commutes to or from work. Fifteen years ago I collected all the notes I could on wintering Snowy Owls well south of the normal range. Most of them came from state bird journals. I was looking for patterns about season, length of stay, etc. The one thing I found was about diet. Snowies are bird hunters and many of the birds that had come south were living on waterfowl. That was true of the Ft. McHenry bird, which dined extensively on Am. Coots and Green-winged Teal. They do take rats and other small mammals, especially in urban areas, but waterfowl is a frequent prey item (I watched the one at Hart-Miller goping after coots, Ruddy Ducks, and scaup). The lesson, I suppose, is to keep your eyes open at any site where ducks are concentrated, which, in Chesapeake Bay Country, doesn't narrow it down much. Rick PS - On his list of likely sites Marshall did not include Conowingo, which has always been MY fantasy spot for one in Maryland! The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd. -- Bertrand Russell Rick Blom rblom@blazie.com 4318 Cowan Place Belcamp, Maryland 21017 (410)575-6086 Editor: BWD Skimmer (www.birdwatchersdigest.com) ======================================================================= To leave the MDOsprey list, send e-mail to listserv@home.ease.lsoft.com with the following message in line 1: signoff mdosprey ======================================================================= =========================================================================